A Most Reliable Ally

Martin Luther King, Jr., edited with introductions by Michael K. Honey, All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 240 pages, $17.00, paperback.Many Americans who have failed to look deeply into the career of Martin Luther King, Jr. hold false assumptions about him. One is that he was a moderate solely focused on achieving civil rights for American Negroes (his terminology), and that he had a dream about a country where, as he said in August 1963, "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Another is that he held to this vision of working within the system and building interracial harmony—"let us not drink from the cup of bitterness and hatred"—until the spring of 1967, when for some inexplicable reason the train flew off the tracks. In his (in)famous Riverside Church speech on April 4, 1967, King came out forcefully against the war in Vietnam, defended the National Liberation Front as a voice for people seeking independence from forces like the United States (whose leaders he accused of saying one thing and doing another), and called for a "radical revolution in values" that put poverty and people ahead of "things." By the time the sanitation workers struck in Memphis one year later, King seemed to have gotten back on track with a more or less traditional labor support role, albeit a critical one, as the spiritual motivator of the strikers.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Dignity · Dream · Hatred · Independence (probability theory) · Memphis · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies